Monday, 8 December 2014

Here is our science project board with all 4 groups' inquiry research on Being Sunsmart

Our title page informs others that we have done some experiments to either confirm or refute our hypotheses or educated guesses.

Cobra's group wanted to find out about whether SPF +50 in sunscreen would protect our skin against the harmful UV rays of the sun.

Keleni's group members rubbed on sun screen only on their right arm and went to play in the sun during the two school breaks,for a week and then they compared both arms to see the difference in the skin colour. They noticed that the person who had light-coloured skin, turned red but the person who had dark-coloured skin, just turned even darker.

Kingkong's group carried out a survey on children's awareness to the harmful rays of the sun and presented their results (how many children wear protective gear like hats) on a Tally chart and Bar graph.

It was interesting to see that most kids at SPS were aware of the dangers of the UV rays even though they were not wearing hats. The survey also showed us that most children were actually taking action to keep safe in the sun.

Here is a picture of the data that Kingkong collected and presented to others in their project.

But our most favourite project was the setting up a terrarium to visualise, first hand the water cycle in nature, but in a miniature form.

We all had fun collecting pebbles, gathering soil and planting little plants in a clear glass jar, when we first set up our terrarium.

Tapout's group did an observation table to record the events or things that happened over

5 weeks in the terrarium experiment. They found that the plants continued to grow because the water cycle processes (evaporation, condensation and precipitation) that was taking place inside the closed system was supporting plant growth.

Here is Avatar's group's evidence of their experiment on whether light-coloured cars or dark-coloured cars would absorb more heat when parked outside for the same number of hours.

We put two thermometers in Mrs Naidoo's silver-white car for 10 minutes, and took a

pre-reading at 9.30am and again a post reading at 2.30pm (5hours) to test the difference between the rate of heating in light-coloured cars and dark- coloured cars.

The conclusion we came up with was that dark-coloured cars like Helle's car retained more heat overnight. But the heating rates of both the cars from morning to afternoon were the same. That is 7 degrees celcius. We were blown away with the results.